apple steve jobs wozniak
Steve Jobs, seen here beneath a photo of him and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, played 'no role at all' in Apple's early success Reuters

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has revealed that fellow co-founder Steve Jobs had no role in the design of early Apple computers as he "did not know technology". In a candid interview with a student website, Wozniak claimed Apple's success in its first 10 years came as a result of work he did that Jobs knew nothing about.

Wozniak made the revelations in a set of three interviews with Reach a Student, a website designed to provide resources to pupils at Windemere Prep in Orlando, Florida. When asked about hardware and software issues in the making of the Apple I and Apple II computers, Wozniak said it was up to him to overcome them by himself.

"Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs of the Apple I and Apple II computers and printer interfaces and serial interfaces and floppy disks and stuff that I made to enhance the computers," Wozniak told Sarina Khemchandani, the 14-year-old founder of Reach a Student.

"He did not know technology. He never designed anything as a hardware engineer, and he never wrote any software. But he wanted to be important, and the important people are always the business people. So that's what he wanted to be."

Wozniak went on to say Jobs played a role in creating the business and the partnership was important in allowing him to focus solely on the technology side. "The Apple II computer, by the way, was the only successful product Apple had for its first 10 years, and it was all done for my reasons for myself, before Steve Jobs even knew it existed," Wozniak said.

"So I had already created it and it was just waiting for a company, and Steve Jobs was my good friend, the business man... So it's very important, even if you are not a business man, find someone who is."

One of the Apple I computers built by Wozniak in the early days is set to go on auction later in September. In 2014, another computer from the first batch fetched £563,904 at auction.